Note from the Publisher:  We've been watching Black Friday and Cyber Monday stories all day, and decided to comment on the one below, noting that TechCrunch is reporting that mobile sales were up a whopping 33% year over year on Black Friday.  While the payments industry has all kinds of potential headaches including cyber hackers and network failures to worry about, the retailers need to keep up with the pace, too.  As example, we recently placed a mobile order on a tablet on JCP.com, and the retail interface was quite clunky, and it ended up defaulting to a ship-to-store rather than ship-to-home, which was incredibly annoying, and has to have happened to countless other tablet customers as well. 

So, as you're watching the stocks this season for the payments industry and for retail for your wealth management clients, make sure you also are monitoring how the retailers' mobile platforms are performing, or even how your own household views them, as that will lead you to clues as to whether the retailers will have a successful season, since mobile is where it's at this year, baby!

"Black Friday online shopping is continuing to grow, and this Friday was another record-breaking day. According to a new report out this evening from Adobe, which has been tracking e-commerce transactions throughout the sales holiday, Black Friday is on track to set a new record by surpassing the $3 billion mark for the first time. It’s also expected to become the first day in U.S. retail history to drive over a billion dollars from mobile sales.

With an estimated $3.05 billion expected by the day’s close, Black Friday 2016 is up 11.4 percent from the same day last year, says Adobe.

[Update, 11/26/16: Adobe’s final numbers indicate that Black Friday surpassed estimates, with $3.34 billion – 21.6 percent growth, year-over-year. Mobile accounted for $1.2 billion, a 33 percent increase from the year before.]

It was clear earlier in the day that mobile was having a significant impact on the record e-commerce sales seen on Thanksgiving Day and on Black Friday. Major retailers, like Amazon, Walmart, Target and eBay, noted that mobile traffic and sales were on the rise. Amazon said that mobile orders on Thanksgiving topped Cyber Monday last year, for example, while Walmart said that over 70 percent of website traffic on Thanksgiving was mobile. Target said that 60 percent of Thanksgiving sales were from mobile devices."


Source:  TechCrunch